“That Show Really Spoke to Me!”

International Journal of Communication 10(2016), 1950–1970 1932–8036/20160005

Copyright © 2016 (Stephanie Edgerly, Melissa Gotlieb, & Emily Vraga). Licensed under the Creative

Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.

“That Show Really Spoke to Me!”: The Effects of Compatible

Psychological Needs and Talk Show Host Style on Audience Activity

STEPHANIE EDGERLY1

Northwestern University, USA

MELISSA R. GOTLIEB

Texas Tech University, USA

EMILY K. VRAGA

George Mason University, USA

One recent change in the U.S. media landscape is the shift toward specialized audiences

consuming specialized news content. With this trend as a backdrop, this study argues

that viewers of a news talk show are more involved with the show’s content when the

style of the show is compatible with their psychological needs. This proposition is tested

across two instances of compatibility: a host promoting critical debate and viewers with

a high need for cognition, and a host promoting humorous commentary and viewers

with a high need for humor. Results from an experimental design support the

compatibility argument. When compatibility occurred, respondents perceived the

program as more relevant, which in turn increased cognitive and behavioral activity

regarding the program’s content.

Keywords: news audiences, uses and gratifications, experiment, need for cognition,

need for humor

The U.S. news landscape has undergone remarkable changes in the past 15 years. Chief among

them is the availability of a wide variety of news options. Television viewers, for example, now choose

from competing sources like network news, public broadcasting, cable news, and even entertainment

sources featuring information on current events. This shift toward increased news choice poses significant

challenges to notions of a mass news audience and powerful news effects. Words like “niche,”

“fragmented,” and “polarized” describe news audiences (Stroud, 2010; Webster, 2014), and effects are

described as “minimal” and “differential” (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008; Xenos & Moy, 2007). The linchpin

Stephanie Edgerly: [email protected]

Melissa Gotlieb: [email protected]

Emily Vraga: [email protected]

Date submitted: 2015–02–04

1 The authors would like to thank Esther Thorson and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

International Journal of Communication 10(2016) “That Show Really Spoke to Me!” 1951

connecting these conceptual shifts is the increased role of individual differences in driving media exposure

and effects. It is not that all television news viewers watch Fox News, or that all who watch are prone to

the same effects (Edgerly, 2015a), but rather that exposure and effects are explained by myriad factors at

the level of both the individual (e.g., age, partisanship, media preferences, personality traits) and content

(e.g., degree of incivility, negativity, close-up camera shots), as well as the interaction of the two. This

study positions itself at the heart of this changing news landscape by developing a framework highlighting

the role of one type of individual difference—the psychological needs of viewers—to reveal the effects of

different styles of talk shows.

News talk shows form a compelling backdrop for investigation, as they increasingly populate the

media environment with various styles. Although the format is not novel—news talk shows have been part

of the television landscape since the 1950s—the types of talk shows containing public affairs information

have expanded to include diverse styles of talk show hosts (Baym, 2013; Hoffman, 2013). Early talk

shows featured a journalist–host appearing with a panel of experts and news figures to discuss politics.

This model is still visible on many Sunday morning news programs (e.g., Meet The Press, Washington

Week), but increased media competition have driven producers to experiment with new talk show models,

both on television and online. One model gaining popularity infuses humor with current events information

(e.g., The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight). These shows’ hosts are largely not journalists by trade (most

are comedians or actors), yet they are vital sources of news and political information for many people

(“Cable Leads the Pack,” 2012) and illustrate the widening space where politically relevant information can

be found.

In building an analytic framework for news talk shows, we took inspiration from uses and

gratifications (U&G), a foundational framework of media exposure. U&G is a fitting perspective for

explaining the nature of news effects in the high-choice media age because it emphasizes how audiences

approach news and how this approach colors news effects (Ruggiero, 2000). We drew on this framework

to establish a link between different styles of talk shows and the psychological needs that influence their

effects. We combined this U&G approach with more recent political entertainment media research

indicating mixed findings as to whether humor in news contexts produces democratically positive effects.

In what follows, we argue that in the high-choice news landscape, individuals are able to consume news

programming that is compatible with their orientations. While recent research has largely focused on the

compatibility between political predispositions and news viewing (Stroud, 2010), we adopt a

complementary approach by examining the compatibility between two psychological needs (i.e., need for

cognition and need for humor) and corresponding talk show host styles (i.e., correspondent host and

comic host). In doing so, we propose a “compatibility argument”: when psychological needs and host style

are compatible, audiences will increase activity with the talk show program in the form of greater

information recognition and willingness to take action.